The Sacred Conspiracy

Russian writer and philosopher Oxana Timofeeva was born and grew up in various parts of the USSR. The book explores the difficulty of reducing one’s sense of homeland to one’s country alone, the philosophical interconnectedness of movement and rootedness, our plant and animal souls, and how we need to reimagine our desired, fictional if need be, homelands. The book interweaves vignettes from Timofeeva’s childhood across different parts of the USSR with a philosophical discussion of ideas on homeland in the thought of Brecht, Deleuze and Guattari, and other main figures of literature and philosophy. 

Oxana Timofeeva is Sc.D., professor at “Stasis” Center for Philosophy at the European University at St. Petersburg, leading researcher at Tyumen State University, member of the artistic collective “Chto Delat” (“What is to be done”), deputy editor of the journal “Stasis”, and the author of books History of Animals (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018; Maastricht: Jan van Eyck, 2012), Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2009), Solar Politics(forthcoming, Polity, 2022).

Commissioned and published by Kayfa ta (2020) 
Translation from Russian by Maria Afanasyeva 
Design template by Julie Peeters 
Cover illustration by Jumana Emil Abboud

Echoing Jean Dubuffet's idea that thought must arise from material in artistic practice, Giuliana Prucca, through this essay, reinterprets a moment in the history of 20th-century art using materials such as stone, sand, earth, and dust. She employs the mineral to illustrate that the creative act would be a trace of the body's disappearance. The loss of humanity and the deconstruction of the subject objectify themselves in the image. In other words, art resides in the tension between representation and its loss, ultimately leaving nothing but an image.

Drawing from the influential figure of Antonin Artaud, she weaves critical and poetic connections between the texts and works of various artists, writers, and thinkers, ranging from Jean Dubuffet to Jan Fabre and Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein and Gutaï, Joë Bousquet to Camille Bryen and Francis Ponge, Gaston Bachelard to Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille to Aby Warburg.

The material is not merely a thematic pretext; it is an active and explosive catapult that questions the arbitrary linearity of a conventionally assimilated art history. Following Ponge's example, Prucca applies the principles of poetry to criticism, starting from Artaud's material, the most undisciplined of poet-artist-thinkers of the modern era. This results in a critically inventive approach dangerously suited to its object, celebrating an anti-critique. The chosen writing materials, stonepaper for the cover and recycled paper for the pages, is consistent, intending to give the impression of being covered in dust.

The essay disrupts traditional reading habits and shatters the conservatism of art criticism by inhabiting writing space differently, presenting a physically engaging interaction. This is an essay in the literal sense, an experience where form never contradicts content, urging readers to take the risk of thinking deeply and embracing a new rhythm. A complex and challenging design invites them to choose different reading options, ultimately treating criticism as one would poetry.

Giuliana Prucca [Paris | Berlin] is an independent curator, researcher, and writer. She is the founder and art director of the publishing house AVARIE, specialising in contemporary art books that explore the relationships between text and image, body and space.

Graphic design, art direction by Vito Raimondi

Writing on Raving is the definitive mix of voices from the Brooklyn underground rave scene and beyond, providing fresh language for the shared and infinitely varied experience of dancing through the night until the morning.

New York rave culture is having a moment. The music, mostly, is techno, certain flavors of which became the soundtrack to a dancefloor culture that is queer in a different way to house music centered gay nightlife. Wark, Mak and Beery want to document and annotate and celebrate, but also critique, this world in the making. Writing on Raving centers the New York scene, but isn't limited to it.

This is a book for all of those who need the rave. Who need to dance. Who have at some point needed that beat in their lives. This is a book for all those who have journeyed through the night, through sound, through movement, through chemistry, into other places, other times, other encounters.

This seeking gives us hours, years, on the dance floor to think about why we rave, to locate these reasons in our bodies and the space around us. But the rave is not the place to articulate them. It is too loud; our friends are too distracted, or too high. At the afters, tired and drained and covered in schmutz, we think some more. We look around at our raver friends, and wonder: How did we get here? What happened to us? What is this tentacular, thrashing, swelling thing that we all made together? That thing that is now slumped and aching and coming down now into our fragmentary, singular lives

Between all of us, there are many answers to such questions. Wark, Mak and Beery have gathered their favorite ones to share in this first-ever anthology of writing on raving.

McKenzie Wark is a writer and scholar based in New York City. She is the author, among other things, of Raving (2023) and Life Story (2024).

Geoffrey Mak is the author of Mean Boys: A Personal History (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Zoë Beery is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, and a nightlife harm reduction organizer at parties and festivals in the U.S. and Europe.

This book is called Unconscious/Television; it is a book that is informed by my discontent with aspects of psychoanalysis, in both its clinical and theoretical dimensions, and the way Lacanian psychoanalysts deal with language. Also, this book aims at posing, because of psychoanalysis, philosophical problems—twisting concepts—that will entangle art and the production of thought.

Within the Lacanian framework, practices are too attached to a notion of the unconscious that is structured as language; especially in relation to the Lacanian proposition that followed Sigmund Freud. With structuralism, which highlights and strengthens the division between nature and culture, Jacques Lacan thinks that Freudian concepts, and his positioning of the unconscious as the cause, should be elaborated or reconfigured as language, with language being the structure of the unconscious, representation operating with signifiers within this structure, and the signifier representing the subject to another signifier.

Above all, what I have been concerned with is a certain relationship to the Other—that is the symbolic, alienation in language, the master signifier—and how stuck we are with this neurotic comprehension of the clinical and the theoretical, and how we need psychotic or perverse possibilities in order to invent new things, new lives, new bodies and worlds, new concepts and thoughts. (Note from the introduction)

TYPP is the community journal of Sint Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp. TYPP is partly a generator for the shared research of our advanced master students, and partly a platform for carefully selected contributions by tutors, students, alumni, guest lecturers and friends of SLA. TYPP is a stage where art and research from this community is shared with you, to enjoy, read, look, learn and get inspired. 

Each edition is carefully and freely designed by Ward Heirwegh. 

Facsimile compilation of the late-'70s journal on diasporic and colonial histories that paved the way for the British Black Arts Movement.

Published in three issues between 1978 and 1979, Black Phoenix: Journal of Contemporary Art & Culture in the Third World (the subtitle was changed to Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture for its second and third issues) stands as a key document of its time. More than a decade after '60s liberation movements and the historic Bandung and Tricontinental Conferences that called for social and political alignment and solidarity to dismantle Western imperialism and (neo)colonialism, Black Phoenix issued a rallying call for the formation of a Third World, liberatory arts and culture movement on the eve of Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979.

Based in the UK, and both international and national in scope, Black Phoenix positioned diasporic and colonial histories at the center of an evolving anti-racist and anti-imperialist consciousness in late 1970s Britain—one that would yield complex and nuanced discourses on race, class and postcolonial theory in England in the decade that followed.

A precursor to the British Black Arts Movement that formed in 1982 (which encompassed such cultural practitioners as the Black Audio Film Collective and cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall), Black Phoenix proposed a horizon for Blackness beyond racial binaries, across the Third World and the colonized of the interior in the West.

This single-volume facsimile reprint gathers all three issues of the journal, which include contributions by art critics, scholars, artists, poets and writers, including editors Rasheed Araaen and Mahmood Jamal, Guy Brett, Kenneth Coutts-Smith, Ariel Dorfman, Eduardo Galeano, N. Kilele, Babatunde Lawal, David Medalla, Ayyub Malik, Susil Sirivardana and Chris Wanjala.

The continuation and culmination of a vast project, articulated between an exhibition and a symposium, imagined by South African curator Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi), inviting 17 artists from Africa and its diaspora and a group of researchers to evoke black aesthetics and propose an alternative vision of a world without borders.

In Zulu, imbizo means "gathering" which is called by the elders when there are communal problems so that everyone listens to each other to see how solutions can evolve. The book Globalisto. A philosophy in flux. Acts of an Imbizo is intended as a hybrid between a catalogue of the exhibition held at MAMC+ from 25 June to 16 October 2022 and the publication of the proceedings of the symposium held on 6 and 7 October 2022. The book is therefore in two parts.

The first part reports on Imbizo part 1: the opening, and on the exhibition curated by Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi) and Aurélie Voltz, director of MAMC+, which brought together artworks by seventeen artists: Sammy Baloji, Raphaël Barontini, Marie Aimée Fattouche, Sam Gilliam, Porky Hefer, Lubaina Himid, Arthur Jafa, Euridice Zaituna Kala, Samson Kambalu, Moshekwa Langa, Myriam Mihindu, Wilfried Nakeu, Otobong Nkanga, Josèfa Ntjam, Sara Sadik, Dread Scott and Gerard Sekoto. A 32-page glossy booklet follows the exhibition line-up, showing at least one reproduction of each artist's work. The playlist that was available to listen to in the first exhibition room has found its place in the book in the same way as a list of works—a flashcode link refers the person who wishes to read the book while listening to music.

The second part of the book, which is its main body, publishes a written transcription of the contributions of the speakers at Imbizo part 2: the symposium on "Art and (de)colonisation". You will find lectures by academics (Norman Ajari, Amal Alhaag, Christine Eyene, Elvan Zabunyan) as well as more visual essays, conceived as transpositions of performances (Jamika Ajalon, Elsa M'Bala) and a more oral proposition, a transcription of a podcast by the Piment collective that took place live in the MAMC+ auditorium. Three interviews introduce the proceedings. The first, with the curator Mo Laudi, is taken from a special issue of Le 1 Hebdo devoted to the "Globalisto" exhibition. The second is a continuation of the first, conducted by Aurélie Voltz, director of the MAMC+, who asks the curator about the follow-up to his project. The last is also a second publication, originally published in Le 1 Hebdo, in which journalists Iman Amhed, Laurent Greilsamer and Maxence Collin interview philosopher Achille Mbembé.

Contributions by Aurélie Voltz, Ntshepe Tsekere Bopape (Mo Laudi), Iman Ahmed, Maxence Collin, Achille Mbembe, Norman Ajari, Christine Eyene, Elvan Zabunyan, Jamika Ajalon, Amal Alhaag, Elsa M'Bala.